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Tenement Press is an occasional publisher of esoteric,
accidental, angular, & interdisciplinary literatures.
My head is my only house unless it rains
Don Glen Vliet
See here for Rehearsal, an ongoing
& growing collation of original (& borrowed)
digital ephemera.
Tenement Press is an occasional publisher of esoteric,
accidental, angular, & interdisciplinary literatures.
My head is my only house unless it rains
Don Glen Vliet
Were a wind to arise
I could put up a sail
Were there no sail
![]()
I’d make one of canvas and sticks
Bertolt Brecht, ‘Motto’
(Buckow Elegies)
I could put up a sail
Were there no sail
Bertolt Brecht, ‘Motto’
(Buckow Elegies)
See here for Rehearsal, an ongoing
& growing collation of original (& borrowed)
digital ephemera.
Ed Atkins, © 2024.
Help
Steven Zultanski
Tenement Press #18
978-1-917304-04-7
175pp [Approx.]
£18.50
PREORDER DIRECT FROM TENEMENT HERE
Publishing 4th April 2025
A quartet of ‘semi-detached’ conversations from the poet.
It’s very early. Six friends are sitting around a table in a kitchen.
They are about to begin playing a game which involves
remembering the deaths of people they didn’t know very well:
acquaintances, neighbours, teachers, classmates, co-workers,
short-term friends with whom the friendship never really
stuck, etc. There’s a pile of spatulas on the table. Some are
wooden, some are plastic, and some are metal. These are props
for the game: before someone recounts a death, they throw a
spatula to the floor to signal the beginning of the story.
[…]
You want to start?
![]()
Death-obsessed, disengaged and overinvested—the four long poems assembled in Steven Zultanski’s Help theatricalise morbid fascinations, self-protective impulses, and unfocused desire. Help is, at its core, a set of conversations; the result of games played between friends that were then transcribed, edited, and embellished. Participants were asked to talk about loss, the death of acquaintances, secret hiding places, mislaid time, and unmet demands. The resulting poems read like meandering scripts for unrealised plays; incidental excavations of persona and place.
In Help speech is pinned to the page and individual voices begin to appear as specimens. It is a catalogue of active disappointments, repeated anti-climaxes, and half-finished dissections. Someone demands endless love, but not from anyone in particular; someone squirms around in their chair, but for no communicable reason; someone hides in a shed, waiting to be found; someone sits in the ‘imagination room,’ and can think of nothing but biographical time. Help isolates these voices and dislocates them—flattens them—displaying them in a kind of vitrine. There’s no vitriol, no explication—but rather a thread of observations that veer toward fiction. These poems are a perpetuation of childish anxieties in the face of impossible need.
Somewhat reminiscent of Linda Rosenkrantz’s Talk (1968) or Alice Notley’s transcription poems of the 1970s, in Help the poet pretends to be a recording device, and the poem an act of remembering. Zultanski’s writing is at once skeletal and overstuffed, dryly unsentimental and yet dripping with melodrama. Help foregrounds its own contradictions in a collection that is at once both extremely personal and distinctly artificial.
![]()
Top—Ralph Gibson,
from ‘Days at Sea,’ circa 1974.
Bottom— Steven Zultanksi,
photographed at dinner, circa 2024.
Steven Zultanski
Tenement Press #18
978-1-917304-04-7
175pp [Approx.]
£18.50
PREORDER DIRECT FROM TENEMENT HERE
Publishing 4th April 2025
A quartet of ‘semi-detached’ conversations from the poet.
It’s very early. Six friends are sitting around a table in a kitchen.
They are about to begin playing a game which involves
remembering the deaths of people they didn’t know very well:
acquaintances, neighbours, teachers, classmates, co-workers,
short-term friends with whom the friendship never really
stuck, etc. There’s a pile of spatulas on the table. Some are
wooden, some are plastic, and some are metal. These are props
for the game: before someone recounts a death, they throw a
spatula to the floor to signal the beginning of the story.
[…]
You want to start?
Death-obsessed, disengaged and overinvested—the four long poems assembled in Steven Zultanski’s Help theatricalise morbid fascinations, self-protective impulses, and unfocused desire. Help is, at its core, a set of conversations; the result of games played between friends that were then transcribed, edited, and embellished. Participants were asked to talk about loss, the death of acquaintances, secret hiding places, mislaid time, and unmet demands. The resulting poems read like meandering scripts for unrealised plays; incidental excavations of persona and place.
In Help speech is pinned to the page and individual voices begin to appear as specimens. It is a catalogue of active disappointments, repeated anti-climaxes, and half-finished dissections. Someone demands endless love, but not from anyone in particular; someone squirms around in their chair, but for no communicable reason; someone hides in a shed, waiting to be found; someone sits in the ‘imagination room,’ and can think of nothing but biographical time. Help isolates these voices and dislocates them—flattens them—displaying them in a kind of vitrine. There’s no vitriol, no explication—but rather a thread of observations that veer toward fiction. These poems are a perpetuation of childish anxieties in the face of impossible need.
Somewhat reminiscent of Linda Rosenkrantz’s Talk (1968) or Alice Notley’s transcription poems of the 1970s, in Help the poet pretends to be a recording device, and the poem an act of remembering. Zultanski’s writing is at once skeletal and overstuffed, dryly unsentimental and yet dripping with melodrama. Help foregrounds its own contradictions in a collection that is at once both extremely personal and distinctly artificial.
Top—Ralph Gibson,
from ‘Days at Sea,’ circa 1974.
Bottom— Steven Zultanksi,
photographed at dinner, circa 2024.
A DESCRIPTION OF A BOOK : ZULTANSKI ON ZULTANSKI
By way of The Kitchen (NYC) /
On Mind / & Montez Press Radio
The following text was written for a joint book launch at Montez Press Radio, May 3rd 2024. My new book of poems, Help [published in the USA by Golias Books, 2024] was launched alongside new books by Marie Buck and Matt Walker [Spoilers, Golias Books, 2024], Emily Martin [My Salvation Lateral, The Elephants, 2024], and Jennifer Soong [Comeback Death, Krupskaya, 2024]. For reasons explained below, I decided not to read directly from the book and instead prepared this text. For publication in On Mind, I’ve lightly edited it, clarifying some ideas and rewriting certain lines that in retrospect struck me as too cheap, or attention-grabbing, or self-deprecating, or audience-pleasing.
—S.Z.
*
It’s not entirely true, but I like to say that the four poems in Help were mostly built by setting up conversations and games between friends which I then transcribed, edited, and embellished. These conversations and games took place in domestic settings, where quiet intimacy provided a permissive context for the expression of feelings which are usually subject to mild repression and social correction, feelings that can be considered childish: morbidity, whininess, silliness, and detachment. Such emotions are often treated as antisocial in public or professional settings, but in my experience, they are inherent—and perhaps often foundational—to close friendships. Friends whine at each other. They giggle at bad jokes. Their voices rise in enthusiasm as they gossip about horrible things.
[...]
I wanted all of the poems in this book to put the reader in the position of the voyeur, though that’s never explicitly thematised. But one of the ways I think about Help is as a book for people who enjoy voyeurism (most people?). Another way I think about it is as a series of transcribed games—linguistic games, social games, power games. Another is as fictionalised performance documentation. Another is as a book of dance, not only because it involves representing bodies as moving or sitting or fidgeting, but because both the characters’ movements and their words are left unadorned by commentary, as open-ended as silent gestures.
*
SEE HERE FOR THE FULL TEXT ℅ THE KITCHEN
*
Praise for Zultanski
Steven Zultanski doesn’t so much risk the obvious as aspire to it, as the Latin poets did.
Robert Glück
Steven Zultanski is a great raconteur. In Honestly, he loquaciously monologues about everything from municipal corruption to asparagus horticulture with charm and authority. But this prose-like poem isn’t merely a filibuster. As it unfolds, Honestly spirals closer and closer to the silence behind speech.
Chris Kraus, on Zultanski’s
Honestly (Book*hug, 2018)
If King Lear’s fool wrote a book, it might be something like Bribery.
The Poetry Foundation, on Zultanski’s
Bribery (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2014)
Praise for Zultanski & Atkins’ Sorcerer
I once compared Sorcerer to a Harold Pinter play. But Pinter never instructed you on how to dismantle your face, amplify your house plumbing, levitate your computer, dance with your sofa, or place a penknife on a bed so that it appears as if no one put it there. Atkins and Zultanski’s play redesigns the contemporary home as a machine for comedy, sadness, and anxiety. Sorcerer is a unique work of theatre and literature, beautiful and unsettling. I can only relate it to the words of the late, great Angela Lansbury: “My family always said I’d travel anywhere to put on a false nose.”
Dan Fox
Vivid on the page, Sorcerer is a surprising and compelling hallucinatory theatre text for a cast of three. In it a set of hyper-naturalistic micro-conversations are laid out in an unblinking deadpan; crisp dialogues that focus in on the body, mapping the detail of daily actions and experiences from the removal of clothing, to the acquisition of new skills, and the precise interior feeling of headaches. Meanwhile, in a dynamic counterpoint to all the talk, a series of playful and increasingly strange physical transformations of the performers and the space they inhabit are proposed. Atkins and Zultanski have made the score for a complex, haunting event.
Tim Etchells
![]()
On Zultanski, Elsewhere
Zultanski & Atkins discuss Sorcerer
at the London Review Bookshop,
30th November 2023.
Atkins & Zultanksi
ON SORCERER
℅ Frieze Magazine
Thomas Oberender
ON SORCERER
℅ Theater der Zeit
Michael Gottlieb
ON HONESTLY
℅ Jacket2
João Paulo Guimarães
& Serena Guerra
ON BRIBERY
℅ English Studies
Steven Zultanski is the author of several books of poetry, including Relief (Make Now, 2021), On the Literary Means of Representing the Powerful as Powerless (Information as Material, 2018), Bribery (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2014), and Agony (Book*hug, 2012). With the artist Ed Atkins, he co-wrote and co-directed Sorcerer, a theatrical project which has been realised as a play, a film, and a book (published by Prototype, 2023). Zultanski’s Help was first published in the USA by Golas Books, 2024. He lives in Copenhagen.
Steven Zultanski doesn’t so much risk the obvious as aspire to it, as the Latin poets did.
Robert Glück
Steven Zultanski is a great raconteur. In Honestly, he loquaciously monologues about everything from municipal corruption to asparagus horticulture with charm and authority. But this prose-like poem isn’t merely a filibuster. As it unfolds, Honestly spirals closer and closer to the silence behind speech.
Chris Kraus, on Zultanski’s
Honestly (Book*hug, 2018)
If King Lear’s fool wrote a book, it might be something like Bribery.
The Poetry Foundation, on Zultanski’s
Bribery (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2014)
Praise for Zultanski & Atkins’ Sorcerer
I once compared Sorcerer to a Harold Pinter play. But Pinter never instructed you on how to dismantle your face, amplify your house plumbing, levitate your computer, dance with your sofa, or place a penknife on a bed so that it appears as if no one put it there. Atkins and Zultanski’s play redesigns the contemporary home as a machine for comedy, sadness, and anxiety. Sorcerer is a unique work of theatre and literature, beautiful and unsettling. I can only relate it to the words of the late, great Angela Lansbury: “My family always said I’d travel anywhere to put on a false nose.”
Dan Fox
Vivid on the page, Sorcerer is a surprising and compelling hallucinatory theatre text for a cast of three. In it a set of hyper-naturalistic micro-conversations are laid out in an unblinking deadpan; crisp dialogues that focus in on the body, mapping the detail of daily actions and experiences from the removal of clothing, to the acquisition of new skills, and the precise interior feeling of headaches. Meanwhile, in a dynamic counterpoint to all the talk, a series of playful and increasingly strange physical transformations of the performers and the space they inhabit are proposed. Atkins and Zultanski have made the score for a complex, haunting event.
Tim Etchells
On Zultanski, Elsewhere
Zultanski & Atkins discuss Sorcerer
at the London Review Bookshop,
30th November 2023.
Atkins & Zultanksi
ON SORCERER
℅ Frieze Magazine
Thomas Oberender
ON SORCERER
℅ Theater der Zeit
Michael Gottlieb
ON HONESTLY
℅ Jacket2
João Paulo Guimarães
& Serena Guerra
ON BRIBERY
℅ English Studies
Steven Zultanski is the author of several books of poetry, including Relief (Make Now, 2021), On the Literary Means of Representing the Powerful as Powerless (Information as Material, 2018), Bribery (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2014), and Agony (Book*hug, 2012). With the artist Ed Atkins, he co-wrote and co-directed Sorcerer, a theatrical project which has been realised as a play, a film, and a book (published by Prototype, 2023). Zultanski’s Help was first published in the USA by Golas Books, 2024. He lives in Copenhagen.
